Saturday, January 31, 2015

President
Maduro presented the results of the CELAC meeting in Costa Rica and
elaborated on one of the grandest conspiracy theories yet proposed by his government.

Speaking on national cadena, Maduro claimed that his
government is facing a broad national and international campaign with the aim
of justifying a possible coup d’état in Venezuela.

“I denounce a
campaign in the field of psychological warfare, to justify a coup d’état, against
Venezuela, supported by the imperial factors of power of the United States. It
is not by chance that the international right has done what it has done in the
last weeks,” claimed
the president.

Maduro also accused
Obama of being behind the conspiracy: “President Obama,” said Maduro, “your
whole government is conspiring in order to overthrow the legitimate government
of Venezuela. I appeal to you and to your consciousness. You well know that all
the agencies of your government are involved [metidos] in a plan to fill Venezuela with violence, in order to
justify a coup d’état and to promote, starting from an escalation of violence,
an intervention in Venezuela. Do you know this?”

US Vice-president Joe
Biden was also accused by Maduro of conspiring against his government.
According to Maduro, Biden told several heads of State of the Caribbean that it
was time to drop support for Venezuela because the Bolivarian Government was
about to fall and Petrocaribe would soon disappear.

Given this broad
conspiracy against his government, Maduro said it would be very hard to
reestablish diplomatic relations between Venezuela and the United States at
this time.

Maduro also explained
that “international factors” want to attack the “moral and the unity” of “fundamental
authorities of the national government that are basic [soportes] to the Bolivarian Revolution.”

Among those at risk
of moral attacks according Maduro are the president of the National Assembly,
Diosdado Cabello; the Minister for Communes and Social Movements, Elias Jaua;
the Minister of Defense Vladimir Padrino López, and the Governor of Aragua
Tareck El Aissami.

On Cabello, international
media has been reporting about the defection of one of his body guards,
Leamsy Salazar, to the United States. Media reports claim that Salazar
could give information on the alleged relation of Cabello with Venezuela’s drug
traffic.

Defense Minister Padrino
López has also
recently come under strong criticism for a published resolution signed by
him regulating the rules of engagement of the armed forces in cases of public
order control. Particularly polemical has been the fact that the resolution
purports to “regulate” the use of fire arms and toxic substances (tear gas) by
security forces when dealing with protests. The use of arms and toxic
substances are strictly prohibited under the 1999 Constitution in controlling manifestations.

The New York Times
and Spanish conservative newpaper ABC were mentioned by Maduro as part of this
international campaign against his government.

On the NYT he asked: “Why
does the NYT devote a complete editorial to Venezuela? Because they are pushing
for, they are giving their approval to a plan of destruction against Venezuela.”

In the case ABC,
which was one of the first papers to report
on Salazar’s defection, Maduro appealed to history and showed printouts of front-pages
of the paper in1939 praising Hitler, and another front-page expressing the
paper’s support for Franco.

“Our people should be
informed, the more information, the more culture we have, the more anti-bodies
we will develop against fascism, against evil, against these campaign of
psychological warfare,” ended Maduro.

The president did not
speak about the claims
he made before traveling to Costa Rica about threads against him made by “terrorist
groups” in the country hosting the CELAC meeting.

Economic war is
defined at the beginning of the note as: “the agreement among certain
producers, importers, distributors, and sellers, enemies of the fatherland, in
order to create scarcity [desabastecer]
in the market, generate malaise among the population, and make the government
[seem] responsible.”

The case of Chile in
1973 is brought up as a historical referent of how “these types of operations
have been employed by the CIA, of the United States, in order to foment the
overthrow of several governments of the world.”

Lest we forget after
reading four paragraphs, the definition of economic war made at the start of
the note is repeated almost verbatim, but in formalizing quotations marks, at
the end.

Here is the complete
note (I’m copying most
of the material in Spanish now, just in case AVN’s web page changes or disappears in the future):

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

President Maduro is
on his way to Costa Rica for a meeting of the Community of Latin American and
Caribbean States. He
is however concerned because he has information about a “group of
terrorists in Costa Rica, who have arrived there in order to threaten me.”

Maduro gave no
further details about the nature of the threats the terrorist group has made.
But he assured that “we have taken all the [necessary] security measures and
the government of Costa Rica is providing us with full support [on this issue].”

Costa Rica’s Foreign
Minister Manuel González has
denied security threats ahead of the meeting: “we have not determined the existence
of any particular risk to the integrity or life of any of our visitors,” said
González.

Maduro salutes at a
meeting of the Popular-Military Command against the Economic War before leaving
for Costa Rica. Image AVN

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

President Maduro is
convinced the “economic war” is a real war that it should be defeated
militarily. He
has announced for today a meeting of the National Bolivarian Armed Forces
(FANB), the “militancy of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), and “members
of the executive” in order to debate a new “especial pilot plan to defeat the
economic war.”

According to Maduro
this meeting should be the basis of a “Civic-Military High Command” which will “definitively
defeat the structures that propitiate scarcity, usury, and speculation.”

The military character
of the war was stressed by the president: “The National Guard has a special
structure for these types of battles, to fight against smuggling, the bachaqueo, and the economic war in all
its forms. (…) We are focused on the economic war and in the defeat, once and
for all, of the economic coup under way in Venezuela.”

Friday, January 23, 2015

Maduro
addressed a crowd a followers today and asked them to be on the lookout for
conspirators whom he claims are waging an “economic war” against the country.

The war has lately turned
into an “economic coup” warned the president: “In Venezuela there is an ongoing
economic coup. I call the people to a battle to face this coup.”

He said that in the
next few days he will make public new evidence of this conspiracy and will ask
the National Assembly to launch an investigation on the issue: “We will open an
investigation on the coup and the actors that have been planning it,” he told
the crowd.

Maduro also referred
to an announced visit by three Latin American ex-presidents: Sebastian Piñera
(Chile), Felipe Calderon (México), and Andrés Pastrana (Colombia). This group
of ex-president plans to meet prominent opposition leaders in a forum organized
by Maria Corina Machado. The group also plans to visit Leopoldo López in military
prison of Ramo Verde, where he is being held for allegedly instigating the violence
during the opposition protest of 2014.

Maduro told the
ex-presidents that they are free to visit Venezuela but that they should be
aware that they will be meeting with an “ultra-rightist” group and that
therefore they are complicit in the coup against him: “they should be clear as
to the fact that they are coming here to support a coup d’état,” he said.

He
also said that this “ultra-rightist” group had plans to assassinate him.

Note how the Agencia Venezolana de Noticia frames
Maduro’s declarations on its report. La
Salida is considered a “coupist group” and it is responsible for all the 43
death during the 2014 protest. In fact AVN states that the group murdered the 43 in “terrorist acts”:

The president of the
National Assembly and vice-president of the PSUV, Diosdado Cabello, warns that “the
destabilization plans pushed by the Venezuelan right seek to generate
disenchantment in the population, [with the aim of] making it oppose the national
government.”

According to the Agencia Venezolana de Noticias, Cabello
told followers at a party workshop that the directives the opposition are
following come directly from a manual written by the Special Forces of the
United States which defines the strategies of “unconventional war.”

The objective of this
disenchantment campaign, according to Cabello, would be to make the people
blame the government for the effects of the “economic war” that the government
claims is being instigated by the right.

Here is the complete
note by AVN (including two more AVN link to revelations by Cabello):

Thursday, January 22, 2015

Unsurprisingly last
night’s speech by Maduro was rich with the conspiracy claims that have
become the official rhetoric of the Venezuelan government.

He began his speech
by reiterating that the young deputy Robert
Serra was murdered by the enemies of the revolution: “Everything was
prepared from Colombia. Paramilitary groups introduced by Venezuela’s extreme right
in order to influence the political development of our country.” Maduro added
that this version has been “fully proven,” even as police investigation has so
far only linked Serra’s own bodyguards to the crime.

As usual he linked
the opposition protests at the beginning of 2014 to a “subversive script”, and
insisted several times that the opposition is waging an “economic war” against
the country.

“No force, no
political option that pretends to reach political power in Venezuela in the twenty
first century will be able to do so under counter-revolutionary banners, [under
the banners] of destabilization and of conspiracy. And much less through the
political, human, moral, and economic destruction of our country,” warned the
president.

As evidence of the
multiple conspiracies he is facing, Maduro played audios
of intercepted phone conversations between retired and exiled general Iván
Carratú Molina and active militaries planning acts of violence.

Notably absent from
Maduros speech was the claim of a plot to kill him and other government officials.
The magnicidio plot played an important role in the government’s
discourse in the first half of 2014, but has been progressively dropped since
June.

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

It’s a tribute to the
force of the aggressive
propaganda campaign in public media by the government, and to the power of
conspiracy theories when they become the official rhetoric, that there is even
a need to debate in serious forums on if
the “economic war” is real and actually happening.

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

The recent campaign spearheaded
by public media (read
this post on the issue by Naky Soto), and private pollster Hinterlaces,
arguing that long lines in supermarket are not the result of scarcity due to
failed economic policies but to a form of neurosis “induced” by the enemies of
the revolution, follows a form of cui bono argument:

“He who stands to
benefit from the crime, has committed the crime”

This form of
reasoning is typical of many police stories and conspiracy theories (Popper
thought it was a basic tool of conspiracy theorizing.) When combined with the pop-psychology
jargon deployed by Hinterlaces or Telesur, and faulty causation, it produces the
curious result of actually blaming the opposition for the lines outside
supermarkets.

The line of the “neurosis”
argument basically runs in two variations:

1) There is really no
scarcity of basic products, but the opposition spreads rumors via social media
that supermarkets are out of products. People then “neurotically” go and line
up (Ingrid
Navarro Leonett.)

2) There is scarcity, but it has been exacerbated
and used by the opposition thus creating the neurotic behaviors of people
lining up to buy stuff they don’t really need (Erick
Navarro.)

Both arguments
conclude that the lines could lead to protests and argue that the opposition
would stand to benefit from those protests. Therefore there is no question that
the opposition holds ultimate responsibility for the lines and the “neurosis”
they generate.

Monday, January 19, 2015

Not only Hinterlaces
is resorting to psychological jargon to explain the “economic war”. Telesur is promoting
this video via its twitter account of a “psychologist and analyst of human behavior”
explaining what is really behind the long lines to buy basic goods in
supermarkets.

According to the
analyst the lines (colas) are “a
strategy of war, a strategy of emotional destabilization, [aimed at] emotional
fragility [to] brake your faith.”

The analyst assumes
from the start that the scarcity that generates the lines is a creation of the
opposition in order to produce protests. Like Hinterlaces, he is concern by the
“neurosis” created by the long lines.

In a confusing
diagnosis towards the middle of the video (1:36), the analyst seems unable to
decide if the people lining up for basic products are either suffering from
what he calls “anguish neurosis,” “hysterical neurosis,” or “phobias.”

Terms such as “economic
war” and “psychological war” have become part of the official conspiracy rhetoric
of the Venezuelan government. Public media and government officials constantly blame
a conspiracy of internal and external enemies for almost every aspect of the
current economic crisis.

At least one private pollster/think
tank, Hinterlaces, also argues the distress many Venezuelan’s are suffering is
not due to misguided government economic policies, but is instead “induced” through
a well-organized, “experienced, and professional ‘mass clinic’ campaign.”

“The current
campaign,” claims the report, “executed by an experienced and professional “Mass
Clinic” [Clínica de Masas], constitutes
a new chapter in a long planned process of accumulation of collective distress
[angustia] that aims at rekindling
the uncertainty and the feeling of defenselessness [of the people], and also at
provoking the overflowing of irrational responses.” All part of an “insurrectional
strategy –through a psyco-social war- that the most radical adversaries of the
Bolivarian Revolution have declared…”

Here is the complete
text in Spanish as published by Hinterlaces on its webpage:

Sunday, January 18, 2015

President Maduro arrived
in Caracas yesterday from his trip to China, Russia and several OPEC
countries and
declared that the opposition had attempted to sabotage his tour: “I knew
that the right would go crazy once I had announced the tour. The first thing
they tried to do was to sabotage the tour. [But] I had to do this tour, (…) the
oligarchic right was not going to sabotage it.”

Maduro also assured
that, in face of the economic war the government claims is being waged against
Venezuela, the country needs to make “an economic transition to a productive
socialism.” He therefore announced that he would be calling wholesale distributors
to the presidential palace of Miraflores to make them sign an “ultimatum” to
force them to stop hoarding basic products.

According to Lisseth Boon from Runrunes the first
time the term was mentioned was by Chávez in June 2, 2010. At that time the
term referred to an economic war that would be waged against the bourgeoisie by the government. The term faded from use
during 2011 and 2012 but resurged from January 2013 on. Since then the “economic
war” has been mentioned 288.

The Runrunes graphic
is very good because it puts the times the “economic war” has been mentioned against
a timetable with the main economic data for the different periods. However it’s
very difficult to pinpoint what constitutes a “mention” of the term because, as
can be seen in previous posts of this blog, many government officials of very
diverse levels make declarations about different aspects of the “economic war”.
Also, public media, such as AVN and the government funded Telesur, mention
the term often.

Friday, January 16, 2015

The Latin-American TV
news channel funded by the Venezuelan government, Telesur, echoes
in this article the conspiracy rhetoric that has become the official government’s
explanation for Venezuela’s economic problems.

The piece is a good
summary of the main points of the “economic war” theory.

It divides the war in
two fronts: internal and external.

The internal front
includes hoarding of basic goods, speculation, the selling at an “overprice” of
products imported with dollars given by the government at a preferential rate,
the use of those dollars to “feed” the black market, the “manipulation” of
products in order to sell them in presentations that are not subject to price
controls, the “disappearance” of certain brands, and smuggling.

On the external front
the country faces: the “blockade” of international loans (controlled by the
United States and its international allies according to the article), the “discredit”
of Venezuela and its economic allies (Russian and China), the “attack against oil
prices” by oversupplying the markets, the “ideological war” (which includes:
protests, “generalized chaos”, violence, and coup threats), and the “political
war” (US sanctions against Venezuelan officials).

No mention is made of
the possibility of government’s policies being in any way responsible for the
current economic crisis.

Also notable: “magnicidio” claims made last year
that the opposition and the Empire were plotting to assassinate the President
and other government officials are absent form this low intensity war against Venezuela.